Long before he became a New York Met, John Franco was a Marlboro Bomber.
The team was named for the Brooklyn housing project in which Franco was raised, not the cigarette brand.
“None of us smoked,” Franco said. “We just played sports, whatever season it was. When we played roller derby, we’d wrap magazines around our forearms and hit each other in the heads.”
For most of the year, baseball ruled the street. In Franco’s world it still does. After playing for 17 seasons, Franco is less than 24 hours from experiencing baseball nirvana–his first World Series and the first Subway Series in 44 years.
“There are a lot of guys who feel fortunate to be in this situation,” said teammate Todd Zeile, who will play in his first Fall Classic after 12 seasons. “Johnny is at the top of the list.”
Franco feels more than fortunate. Not only has the 40-year-old reliever appeared in 547 games for the Mets, more than any other pitcher in franchise history, he suffered through some terrible seasons. The 1993 club lost 103 games.
“Sometimes you’d already be out of the [playoff race] in June,” he recalled. “When you were driving to the ballpark, you’d want to put the car on autopilot. You didn’t want to go but you had to.
“But you never give up hope. If I gave up hope, I would have taken my uniform off a long time ago. As long as I was still capable of pitching, there was always that chance I’d get on a team that got hot and got in the playoffs. And anything can happen in the playoffs.”
The Mets found that out this season. After making it to the postseason via the wild card, they steamrolled San Francisco and St. Louis in the playoffs, losing only two games.
Franco has played a key role all along. After losing his closer’s role midway through the 1999 season, Franco became one of the National League’s top lefty setup men. He went 5-4 this season with a 3.40 ERA, posting 24 straight scoreless outings during one stretch.
But Franco’s accomplishments as a big-leaguer are not what will make this Subway Series so special for him. You have to go further back than that, to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, in the early 1970s.
Franco is the only Met from the state of New York, let alone the city. Game 1 starter Al Leiter grew up a Mets fan, but he was raised in New Jersey.
And Leiter does not have an accent like that of Franco, who pronounces “neighborhood” as if it didn’t have an “r.”
Franco recalled how he and his buddies from Building 5–“the Abbate brothers, Mikey Soto, Isaac and Barry Carrington,” said Franco, ticking names off the roster–would take on the kids from Building 4 in stickball.
They used a real baseball bat, but the other equipment was makeshift. They folded cardboard boxes to make bases and wrapped electrical tape around the core of old baseballs.
“When somebody got a [new] baseball, we cherished it,” Franco said.
They fielded nine-player teams with Franco usually playing the outfield, not pitcher.
“I could hit then,” he said. “I used all my hits in high school and Little League.”
On the rare days when Franco wasn’t playing ball, he would go to Shea Stadium to root for his team, the Mets.
“I took the B train to 42nd Street and then the 7 train,” he recalled.
Franco now drives to the games from his home in Staten Island, which he calls the suburbs. But it’s clear Franco never will forget where he came from–and where he has arrived.
“It’s very special,” he said, “to be part of history.”
